I have not seen 30 Days of Night, and it is not likely I will anytime soon, but I wondered, Streebo, if you would like to respond to the following criticism of the film on the AV Club. Again I have not seen the film, but it seems like a devastating thing to say. It is the kind of thing that makes me avoid a film.

8 comments:

I might rent this film eventually, or catch it in the repertory cinema down the street (if it even gets there), if only because I need to see a film that earned this quote from a review (I posted this at my own blog, but what the hell...):

"'30 Days of Night' is a stupid, stupid film, a disaster at the script and casting stages. It's like a turd covered in tasty Ghirardelli chocolate - as soon as you sink your teeth in you know you've got mouthful of sweetened shit."

Holy cow. I decide to check Geoff's blog before I go to bed and this is what I see!

"For some unaccountable reason, a key conflict within the vampire ranks doesn't make the big-screen transition, so the bulk of the drama falls to a stock collection of human characters. Which is more interesting: Vampires fighting over the potential long-term blowback of their Alaskan buffet, or a couple of exes bonding under duress?"

Hmmm. . .This might be a valid criticism in terms of adapting the film from the actual graphic novel. I accept the film as an entity separate from the graphic novel and it deserves to be judged as a separate work. Unfortunately my copy of the graphic novel is on loan to a friend at the moment and I haven't read it since 2003. The question is not of what is more interesting - but which one helps build the needed feelings of dread? The film doesn't go into the politics of the graphic novel instead opting for the simple setup of the situation of isolated characters trying to survive the vampire onslaught. Horror films are meant to scare us plain and simple. End of story. I love a good horror film or superhero story with subtext and implied metaphor as much as anyone – but it is simply not needed in this situation. This film is about creating effective tension and scares by placing the characters in what seems to be a rather hopeless situation. This is not about "drama" - but rather about creating fear.

The character development is kept to a minimum - but not to a fault. In some ways the secondary characters serve as cyphers to allow us to experience the situation by proxy. The relationship between the sheriff, Eben, and his estranged wife, Stella, serves to humanize their characters just enough to make us sympathize with their situation and fear for their safety. If the film had opted to follow the politics and overall plans of the vampires, it would have lost the layers of tension developed by staying so close to the plight of the Barrow residents. The vampires are left ambiguous and undefined. Nothing is known of them or their plans. They are simply feral beasts here to feast on whatever draws breath in the town of Barrow. This ambiguity leaves room for interpretation for the vampires designs and origins. In many ways this adds to the uncanny quality surrounding the vampires. Had their designs and plans been laid out in detail – they would have been humanized and subjected to our scrutiny. As it is we can only guess at their broader schemes – and fear the course of action they currently follow.

In short, I strongly disagree with the AV Club review. 30 Days of Night made all the right choices and delivers the foreboding atmosphere that a fearfilm needs to be effective. Highly recommended to fans of horror films.

As someone who works at a theater that is playing the movie, I have to say that a good amount of people are coming out enjoying it but complaining that too much time was spent with the humans and not enough on the actual vampires. Personally, I loved every minute of the movie. I enjoyed that the Vampires remained kind of mysterious and I was glad to get some human characters to feel for and want to live. Even when the movie nearly derailed itself with a lame child vamp, they dealt with that in a glorious way!

I'm going to agree with Streebo (though maybe not as a 9 out of 10), the makers made the right choice by going with the humans. Streebo calls out a pretty compelling storytelling reason for not hanging out with the monsters. Myself, while I think the two leads (the exes) were the weakest of Barrow citizen plots, the victims provide the opportunity for watching reactions to horror and sympathy from the audience, and that's just more interesting than vampires posturing in likely ridiculous fashion. It was similar to a zombie (slow-style) movie, in that the situation became a slow siege rather than a shoot-out. So even though it wandered up and down the smarter/dumber than the audience ladder a bit (between exploring a few things horror movies don't touch as often and explaining plot points in exposition), and that roughed up some scenes and transitions, it was petty crowd-pleasing. Criminally weak sound effect choices though.

Also, it could be that I took to the movie because I don't think much of the graphic novel.

I wrote a review of 30 Days of Night for my local paper, and my response was similar to Streebo's, though not as overwhelmingly positive. I'm also in agreement with hcduvall--I think my enjoyment of the movie was inversely proportional to my disappointment with the graphic novel.

In my review, I did comment on the absence of the vampire politics subplot, but I didn't think of it as necessarily a weakness. In fact, like Streebo, I like that the vampires' nature and origins are kept mysterious, though I also found some of the human character development tedious.

However, that vampire subplot is instrumental in setting up the graphic novel's sequels, and I'm wondering where the films will go if this one happens to generate sequels as well (I imagine 30 Days could become a successful straight-to-DVD series).

I haven't seen the movie, but I've read the book (a few years ago), and it seems like one of the problems I had with the book survived the transition intact: the time jump to the end of the story (my favorite film critic, Vern, mentions it in his review). We see the vampires show up on the first or second day of darkness, then we jump to the 29th day, skipping over the whole siege of the town. There could have been a lot of interesting stuff there, but it ended up going straight to a final showdown without any middle. Sure, it keeps the story lean and simple, but it seems like a missed opportunity to examine what the vampires were doing during that whole time or how the people were holding up while they were hiding and trying not to be discovered.

But I haven't seen it myself (maybe I'll catch it when it comes out on DVD), so maybe my opinion of the film will be different.

I probably tend to go overboard in praise of some horror films. The reason for this is that the horror fan community seems to be the anti-matter opposite of the comic fanboy community. Where it seems to me that comic fanboys seem to praise every Major Event book that comes out of Marvel and DC - conversely - horror fans deride every single horror film that is released. I have taken it upon myself to be an island unto myself and encourage people to support the quality horror films when they hit the theaters. It's all part of my plan to win friends and influence people by disagreeing with as many fan communities as possible.

About Me

Geoff Klock has a big degree from a fancy-pants university. He wrote some books on superheroes and poetry like 10 years ago. Also essays on film, and TV and teaching. You have Google, right? He spoke at the Met once, and inspired a name of a villain in Matt Fraction's Casanova, which is a really good comic book. He made a crazy mash up of like 200 movie and TV clips quoting Hamlet. Geoff teaches mostly writing, but also Old Brit Lit and Film, at BMCC. He rides a bicycle to get there. He is very good at Facebook?

Email Me

Twitter Updates

Regular Guest Bloggers

Jason Powell has taken on the yeoman's job of doing an issue by issue analysis of Chris Claremont's 17 year Uncanny X-Men run in an effort to make me feel bad for saying Morrison invented all kinds of things he did not in his New X-Men run, and for spelling Claremont "Clairmont" in my superhero book.

Scott McDarmont (Scott91777) is an Instructor Of English at Radford University, Radford VA, an avid reader of books by guys named Chuck, he usually “waits for the trade” on comics unless Frank Miller is somehow involved. He owns more Def Leppard CDs than Bob Dylan CDs and he is ‘Ok’ with this and, while he may answer different publicly, he secretly feels that The Empire Strikes Back is the best movie ever made. He also feels that there are two kinds of people in the world: Indiana Jones people and John McClane people. He considers himself an Indiana Jones person

Jill Duffy, girl reporter, is a professional writer and editor in New York. She spent five years covering video game development in both San Francisco and London, examining the art, science, and business of the industry, and in 2006 was named one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry. Her work has appeared in The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, where she was the food section editor, as well as Game Developer, Gamasutra.com, Intelligent Enterprise, DigitalTrends.com, and several other publications. She holds a BA in English from the University at Buffalo. Indeed, she is on the Twitter and also keeps a blog about food.

Andy Bentley is a graphic designer in upstate New York. The first series of Batman movies got him in a comic book store and the DC animated series made him a life long fan. His senior thesis was a short film on the culture of comic books. Animal Man, Starman, and Preacher are among his favorite comic runs. He is an avid toy collector and enjoys playing basketball, mash-ups, karaoke and dark beers. He will be sequestered most of September with The Beatles: Rock Band.